Frailty | Lally's Game | Under Construction
Teenage girls can be so fragile.
"Why do you feel you can’t give to yourself, Jessica?"
"Because of the past." A tremor radiated through her body. The past, the past. The horrible past. "I—I just didn’t make the right choice. I mean, that’s how I got where I am. I gave up everything. So there had to be a good reason for that, right? And now I’m asking just for a little piece back. Not something so big, really. Just a little thing for myself. Is it too wrong to ask?"
Jessica is a young, mysterious teenage girl who spends her days flitting between high school and her part-time job at the hospital. Nobody really knows much about her; she keeps her head down, stays quiet, and tries not to draw too much attention to herself. When a boy brings her out of her shell, she starts to wonder if maybe she can be happy, even if it's just for a little bit. She hasn't had that feeling in years, not since she made the wrong choice and tore everything apart...
The first short story of the Tales from the Pizzaplex series, Frailty is the opening story of the first book, Lally's Game. It is heavily implied to be connected to the previous series' second short "To Be Beautiful" and the character of Eleanor.
Tropes related to “Frailty”:
- Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Jessica, with her brunette hair, dark clothes, and desperate desire to remain unseen.
- And I Must Scream: Just like Sarah before her, Jessica ends this story reduced to a pile of scrap metal, unable to feel or presumably even think. In somehow a worse way than Sarah, Jessica slowly falls apart as she shaves her own necklace, leaving bits of junk behind her, eventually beginning to leak oil as she removes the last of her remnant.
- The Atoner: Jessica sees her sacrifices at the hospital as the only way to atone for her mistake in the past.
- Body Horror: As is typical with Eleanor's victims, Jessica slowly finds herself turning into a robot, starting with her beginning to leak oil in the middle of prom. She also has a Nightmare Sequence in which someone rips her arms out of their sockets.
- Brainy Brunette: Jessica's got a penchant for robots. Unfortunately for her.
- Broken Bird: Implied with Jessica, who used to be an average teenager and now is a shell of a person in more ways than one.
- Broken Tears: Jessica finally breaks down at Prom, realizing that she will never be able to have any shred of happiness again, and races back to the hospital to sacrifice the rest of her energy to save April.
- Children Are Innocent: The kids at the hospital are very sweet and naive, with April being very blunt and direct. Another little boy believes Jessica to have been an angel and asks Nurse Macy when he can see her again.
- Cinderella Plot: Somewhat; Jessica works herself overtime in order to save others, giving bits of herself away. Nurse Macy acts as the "fairy godmother," buying her a beautiful prom dress so she can go to the dance with a boy she likes. Only for it all to go wrong, and for Jessica to sacrifice herself for a little girl in the hospital.
- Cope by Pretending: April copes with her cancer by imagining herself living a normal life like the other teenagers in the hospital. When Jessica tells her that she can make it to prom if she believes in herself, April describes a detailed fantasy of going to a dance like that.
- Creepy Cemetery: Where Jessica lives in order to keep a low profile.
- Dark and Troubled Past: All that Jessica admits is that she made "the wrong choice" and lost her entire family and life because of it. Considering the ending, it's very likely that she made some kind of deal with Eleanor, who transformed her into metal and did something to kill her family. Unlike Sarah, however, Jessica was able to retain her pendant and escaped, vowing to spend the rest of her short life making up for what she'd done.
- Downer Ending: While Jessica is able to save April, she dies knowing that she, just as she'd feared, cannot have any form of happiness ever again, all because of her past mistakes.
- Dying Alone: Jessica kills the last bit of herself above a sleeping April after locking the adults out of the room, meaning she turns into a pile of junk all on her own.
- Forced Transformation: After whatever happened, Jessica is only bits of scrap metal held together by an illusionary pendant, which she is slowly shaving away to save sick children in the hospital. As it disappears, more and more of her junk gets left behind, until she's nothing but a pile of scrap.
- Foreshadowing: In Jessica's Nightmare Sequence, whatever is stealing her pendant rips her arms off first, just like the Mimic will do in its future appearances.
- Friend to All Children: Jessica specifically went after this job in the hospital in order to help the children there, and the kids, while they mostly don't know her as her and only see her as an angel, absolutely adore her.
- Glamour: Like Sarah and Eleanor, Jessica was able to use the pendant to disguise herself as a normal, non-scrap-metal teenage girl.
- Goth: Jessica starts wearing dark clothes in order to blend into the background and keep attention off of herself.
- Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Jessica's prom outfit is a "slim, ankle-length lilac dress" with flowers etched on the design.
- Guardian Angel: The kids in the hospital think that Jessica is this, asking Nurse Macy when the angel will come back.
- Guilt-Induced Nightmare: It's implied that Jessica's Nightmare Sequence is a common occurance brought on by her guilt.
- Heroic Sacrifice: As penance for her past, Jessica has started shaving off Remnant from her pendant in order to heal sick children in the hospital. At the end, she dies giving the last of it to April.
- High Heel Hurt: At first, Jessica has difficulty walking in the heels Nurse Macy picked out for her. Macy tells her that she just needs a little practice.
- High-School Dance: Robert asks Jessica to the school dance, which makes her terrified of the idea of giving herself a little happiness. She eventually goes... and it all goes horribly wrong.
- Homeless Hero: Jessica lives inside of a mausoleum, and lists that as her address on her hospital application. When Nurse Macy tells her she couldn't find her house, Jessica awkwardly says she'll fix it later and changes the subject.
- Hope Spot: Poor Jessica just desperately wanted one good night at prom, to pretend she was normal for a few seconds. It backfires, and she's left a broken mess.
- Iconic Item: Jessica's pendant, which used to be a heart like Sarah's, is now in a somewhat crescent-moon shape after she started using it on sick children. She also has a necklace of a "lucky rabbit's foot" that she had in her life before whatever happened with Eleanor.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: After whatever happened with Eleanor, Jessica just wants things to go back to how they were. April, the little cancer patient in the children's wing, also just wants to be a regular student rather than a dying kid.
- Irony: Possibly intentionally, Jessica chooses to sleep in a graveyard mausoleum, as she's basically already dead and living on borrowed time.
- It's All My Fault: Blaming herself for whatever happened in the past, Jessica spends the rest of her half-life trying to make up for it.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: Young April tells Jessica that she has blood cancer and won't survive long, and pitifully asks her to tell her about her normal high-school life so she can imagine something she'll never have. It's heavily implied at the end that Jessica's sacrifice cured her, or at least stabilized her.
- Machine Blood: Rather than bleeding, Jessica begins leaking motor oil at prom, which coats both her and Robert.
- Mysterious Past: Jessica won't tell anyone where she came from or what happened to her. It's clear it has something to do with Eleanor, but that's about all we got.
- Nightmare Sequence: Jessica has one while sleeping in the graveyard, of someone stealing her pendant and ripping her apart.
- No Antagonist: While it's heavily implied that Eleanor was involved in this plot, she does not appear in the story and seems long gone, leaving the story having no antagonist.
- No Full Name Given: Nobody here gets a last name.
- Not Like Other Girls: Jessica gets this from Robert, actually word-for-word.He smiled. "Like I couldn't tell. You're not like the other girls.""I know. I'm not trying to be conceited. I just know that I'm... different. Weird.""I wouldn't call you weird. I mean, other girls I've met like to talk about themselves. Sometimes too much. Worry about a lot of drama. You handle things differently, quietly. It's nice."Jessica didn't know what to say.
- Objectshifting: Jessica transforms into scrap metal at the end of the story.
- Older Than They Look: Possibly; Jessica is fourteen, but seems to have been traveling to places where nobody knows her in order to help dying people. It's implied that what happened with her family took place years ago, and the Pizzaplex is mentioned to be open, which happens a while after the events of the first few games that Fazbear Frights (and therefore, Eleanor) seemed to be close to.
- Parental Substitute: Nurse Macy starts to become this for Jessica, though she doesn't know a whole lot about what the girl is going through. When a saleslady mistakes Jessica for her daughter, Nurse Macy doesn't correct her and pays for her outfit.
- The Promposal: Robert uses his and Jessica's practice time for their robotic project to ask her to prom. She becomes distraught over the idea of giving herself something, but eventually accepts.
- The Quiet One: Jessica intentionally makes herself this, so that nobody will notice her as she goes around giving her remnant to others.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Nurse Macy is genuinely caring and concerned about what's happening with Jessica. Father Jeremiah is patient and listens to her, and encourages her that the Lord wouldn't want her to suffer endlessly.
- Saintly Church: There's a chapel connected to the hospital, where Father Jeremiah prays with family members. He becomes a great source of comfort to Jessica, and seems to be the first to put together what's happening to her.
- Sole Survivor: Jessica, of whatever happened with Eleanor.
- Stealth Sequel: Jessica is all but directly confirmed to have fallen prey to Eleanor in the same way Sarah did, seeing as she's actually made of scrap metal and uses a heart-shaped pendant to retain her former human appearance, as well as having a strong aversion to the junkyard.
- Survivor's Guilt: Jessica is the last surviving member of her family, who all died due to whatever happened with her and Eleanor.
- Transformation Horror: The end of the story, in which Jessica is rapidly turning to scrap and leaking oil as she desperately tries to get back to the hospital, is quite alarming.
- Trauma Button: Jessica gets triggered when Robert asks her to go to the junkyard with him to look for parts. Considering what happens to her at the end, and implication she ran into Eleanor, who likes to hang around in those kinds of spots, you can't really blame her.
- Troubled Teen: Poor Jessica is a Shrinking Violet after all that's happened, hiding in the shadows and giving bits of herself away so she can do something good before she inevitably dies.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: As a victim of Eleanor, Jessica fell prey to this, as well as her Prom breakdown.
